What will news media look like in 15 years time?

This blogpost is an experiment. I've been writing an opinion editorial about the future of news media, which you can find here in Dutch and here in English, it will also be available in our print newspaper De Tijd on Saturday, May 28. I talk about the dramatic changes in connectedness (ubiquitous broadband internet access, wearable devices... ), but also about filters which influence the way we look at the news: human editors (journalists, bloggers... ) but increasingly also algorithmic ones.

I'm convinced that being transparent about the way in which we select information and provide context will become even more crucial for our democracies. That's why I did not want to just write an article, but to report about the whole research and writing process itself.

In this post you'll find how I proceeded but also links and videos related to the article. I could not use all the precious stuff people suggested, but by publishing it all here I hope to facilitate further research by others.

Tuesday, May 24

Our website www.tijd.be exists 15 years (Dutch texts) now... and I'm working on a blogpost/article answering the question "what will the news media look like in 15 years time". Any ideas, suggestions, links would be highly appreciated!

I'll report here about the answers I'll get and the ideas I come up with myself.

If you want to participate, please feel free to use any language you're comfortable with.

Wednesday, May 25

I got some interesting comments in this distributed discussion. Most of the answers came from Quora (the Silicon Valley based questions&answers forum) and from a network I did not mention yesterday: The Well (based in San Francisco, in internet-time ancient social network where people use real identities and which charges a fee to participate).

I'm trying to organize my thoughts in this mindmap, it's a wikimap, feel free to change and add stuff.

Several people suggested this thought-provocative video about the future of media:

Another video features Eli Pariser discussing the 'Filter bubble' - about the dangers of only finding information which suits you, rather than finding what you 'should' know. Pariser is the author of The Filter Bubble, What the Internet Is Hiding from You, published by Viking (an imprint of Penguin Books), 2011.

Thursday, May 26

Getting lots of suggestions now, and my deadline is coming closer. Here a quick overview, using Storify. Not mentioned in this list are helpful suggestions on the Facebook group Newslab - Exploring News3.0. On LinkedIn Answers I got a suggestion to explore the 'attention span' issue, and this link to a search of scholarly articles on Generational differences in attention span since 2008. I did not explore this any further in the context of my article (one has to make choices), but I'm glad to mention it here.

My text for publication tomorrow is being edited as I write this. In the print newspaper I'll put a reference to this blogpost and I added an introduction to this post. While there was no discussion on this blog (maybe I did not explain well enough what I was up to), I learned a lot discussing on Twitter, Facebook, The Well, Quora etc. Sometimes it was enough to explain the project in order to get feedback (The Well, Quora, Facebook), sometimes (Twitter) I had to ask specific persons in my network. It was fun experiencing how at one point someone on Facebook mentioned a discussion I had on Twitter - life in a distributed media world is not always easy, but it really is fascinating!